Train up a child in
the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
-Proverbs 22:6
Of course, this proverb is universally applicable. Drug
addicts, criminals, sexual aggressors, and the like also bear the yoke of
inculcation, for time and repetition are the inimitable friends of routine,
just as routine is the inimitable foe of freedom. We hear the cliché that
children are innocent and it is true. But what is innocence if not the relative
of naiveté, ignorance, impressionability, and vulnerability? The ancients
understood that to introduce a habit into the early life of a child is to
impress upon him or her a life-style.
Well, what if in those impressionable years the wrong message was sent?[1] What
if the wrong habit was exercised by the child’s confusion and the world’s
disinterest? What does this say about choice? About free-will? What if this
habit became a source of some distorted form of pleasure, a pleasure which
should have been fostered properly and handled with care but instead was neglected
and mal-handled. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and idle minds craft
megaliths. The search for that source is unending, whether it be an attraction
to the process of searching, or a magnetism to the façade of a skin-deep objectification,
this is a learned thing; it’s some distorted form of training.
[1] Let’s
not get bogged down by unnecessary narratives. Let’s not ask questions like “what
is wrong and what is right?” These questions are not beneficial, for those born
within the superstructure are its very byproduct; even the counter-culture is a
part of the dialectic.
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